Usually these posts are for questions by readers, but I had a burning e-book-related question that I need answered, and I can’t figure out a better place to do it than here.
I’m just about to start preparing the Kobo Reader my Dad asked me to buy for him, and as I mentioned before he’s a huge fan of Anthony Trollope. I’d like to load the Kobo up with every Trollope work I can, and there are 76 of them on Project Gutenberg—but downloading them one at a time could be rather time-consuming. And Project Gutenberg does not keep its files in directory by author (rather, by year and number of book) so I can’t do a mass FTP directory download, either.
Does anyone know of a simple way to snag all of these books at once (be it from Gutenberg or elsewhere) that doesn’t require a lot of extra work?
The is a customizable ISO creator at
http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/pgiso
That might be of some help.
–Andrew
It seems one has to pay $4.69 for the convenience of a single file.
MobileRead has seven in their epub library, but more than forty in the mobi library. You still have to download them one by one, but you can do a batch convert using Calibre. Most of the mobi files were uploaded by the late Patricia Clark, so they will be nicely formatted for you, and Calibre gives you decent conversion options. I’d start there.
There’s a site I found called http://www.freekindlebooks.org/ which collects .mobi format books by author. There are probably others too.
I don’t know if the Kobo can read them, but what I did is:
Use Mozilla Firefox browser (free), and get the add-on ‘DownThemAll’ (also free). Browse to the appropriate page (eg freekindlebooks.org) and set the selection mask to ‘.mobi’. Check all files are selected, and manually un/select as required. Set an appropriate download directory, then let the download run.
Once you have the files, Calibre can convert between loads of formats in bulk, and you should be able to get what you need.